THE 1996 PUBLICATION OF LISA LOWE'S MONUMENTAL WORK, IMMIGRANT ACTS, profoundly reconfigured the terms of Asian American literary and cultural studies in its theorization of the relationship between the state, capital, and culture.1 In particular, Lowe's book made an engagement with Enlightenment liberalism's relationship to the nation-state a crucial concern. Although the title of David Leiwei Li's book alludes most obviously to Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, actually Imagining the Nation is more directly a contribution to the set of discussions articulated in Lowe's text.2 Li argues that Asian American racialization is produced out of an incongruity inherent in the practice of the nation-state: the tension between, on the one hand, the promise of universal citizenship and, on the other, the reality of differential access to the state based on race. Asian American literature, then, registers this inconsistency, sometimes expressing the racializing func-